Horse injures jockey Baze before start of fifth race

Arcadia  Jockey Tyler Baze was injured before the start of the start of the fifth race Saturday when his horse reared up, head-butted him and then stepped on his calf before running off.

Baze was taken to Scripps Hospital. Initial reports indicated he had a badly swollen eye and a bruised calf, but later, his agent, Vic Stauffer, said Baze requested that any further medical information be withheld until he receives a second opinion from another physician.

Baze was getting ready to load Night Justice, a 3-year-old gelding, for the fifth race when the accident happened. He was taken by ambulance, initially to the Del Mar Racetrack First Aid area and then to the hospital.

Baze missed two weeks in mid-August last meeting here when he was unseated in the post parade and broke a pinkie finger.

Before this accident, Baze had won four races in the first three days of the meeting.

Osunitas Stakes

Lilly Fa Pootz, with jockey Joseph Talamo, won the 59th running of the Osunitas Stakes Saturday for fillies and mares 3 years old and up over 1 1/16 miles on the turf course. Trained by Jerry Hollendorfer, Lilly Fa Pootz is a 5-year-old mare by Gilded Time out of Dark Rhythm. The third choice in the betting, Lilly Fa Pootz paid $15.20, $6.60 and $4.40. Burg Berg with jockey Joel Rosario was second. Betting favorite U R All That I Am finished fifth.

Notables

•Trainer John Shirreffs said Saturday that super mare Zenyatta will work next at Hollywood Park “around the 31st” of July. Shirreffs would not say whether Zenyatta, who is undefeated in 17 straight races, was going to race here on Aug. 7 in the Clement L. Hirsch on the Polytrack, which the mare has won in the last two meetings here. When asked what he thought of the Polytrack, he said. “I just got here.”

Asked if he might make a decision soon on whether to bring Zenyatta here, he said: “Not really. She’s scheduled to work next week, and so we’ll put off any decision until after she works.”

•Trainer Doug O’Neill, fresh from winning the training title at Hollywood Park, is off to a great start here.

O’Neill missed 15 days of the Hollywood meeting due to a suspension in Illinois when one of his horses, Stephen’s Got Hope, was tested and found to have an excess level of carbon dioxide (TCO2). The test is used to determine whether horses get an overload of bicarbonate before racing, a practice known as milkshaking. It reduces lactic acid build-up and prevents fatigue in race horses.

O’Neill’s Stephen’s Got Hope finished seventh in the Illinois Derby at Hawthorne. O’Neill was suspended in Illinois, and rather than fight to appeal the suspension and race in California, O’Neill consulted with his owners and then decided to shut his barn down and rest his horses.

In four days of racing here, O’Neill has taken those rested horses and jumped out to the early lead in the trainer standings with six wins. Two of those were for the colorful Great Friends Stable, an ownership syndicate started by Scott Kaplan and Billy Ray Smith of the morning show on XX Radio 1090-AM, with oversight of that wild herd by Craig Dado, senior vice president of marketing of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club.